When I began these conversations, I thought I was trying to understand a change. Artificial intelligence was beginning to occupy an increasingly visible place in the way people searched for information, compared alternatives and made decisions, and I was interested in thinking about what that might mean for a hotel. After seeing the tools we work with change so many times, it seemed reasonable to do once again what hospitality had always required us to do: observe, learn and try to understand what was happening before deciding how to respond.
I did not imagine then that the question would eventually take me so far away from technology and, at the same time, so close to things that had been in front of me for years.
I worked in hospitality long before artificial intelligence could play a part in choosing somewhere to stay. I saw periods when much of a booking depended on the recommendation of a travel agent or a guide, and others when we began to discover the possibilities of the Internet. Then came new ways of selling, comparing, reviewing and searching. Each change brought words we had to learn, tools that seemed indispensable and certainties that, not long afterwards, needed to be reconsidered. It will surely happen again.
For a long time, I thought about those changes mainly from the perspective of management. We needed to understand them because they could affect sales, operations, our relationship with guests or the way we competed. That remains a responsibility for anyone managing a hotel. Ignoring a transformation simply because we do not yet know how long it will last has never seemed to me a particularly prudent way to manage anything.
And yet, as these conversations progressed, I began returning to scenes that were considerably less new: an arrival that needed to be prepared for, a room that was better changed before handing over the key, a need someone managed to notice even though it had not been expressed very clearly, someone at reception who knew something that might matter to the housekeeping team, a guest who months later remembered a gesture that probably no one had thought of as part of a strategy. And also a promise that seemed simple until the operation revealed how difficult it was to sustain every day.
I had experienced situations like these many times. Anyone who has spent years working in hotels will probably recognise similar ones. Some belong to working days we eventually forget; others remain with us for some reason. What changed while I was writing was not necessarily those scenes, but the way I looked at them.
I began by asking myself how a hotel could get an artificial intelligence system to understand it well enough to recommend it. The question was valid, and it still is, but very soon it forced me to ask other, much older questions: what exactly we expected it to understand, whether the hotel itself could explain it clearly, whether guests recognised the same reality, whether the operation was able to sustain it, and how much of what the organisation knew could be discovered by someone who was still outside. Each answer seemed to move the question a little further inwards.
Perhaps that is why, now that I have reached the end, I have the feeling that this book turned out to be less about artificial intelligence than I imagined when I began, and more about hospitality than I expected. And I am glad it did.
Not because technology matters less. Probably the opposite. Systems capable of interpreting information, understanding needs and participating in a recommendation will become increasingly capable, and hotels will have to learn to live alongside them just as they learned to do with other intermediaries and tools. Some practices that seem new today will become ordinary, and others will appear for which we do not yet have names. But writing these conversations reminded me that a transformation can be important without everything having to begin again.
A hotel still needs to know who it is and what it can genuinely offer. It depends on people capable of observing, deciding and sharing what they learn; it needs to recognise the distance between what it promises and what it manages to sustain; and it continues to welcome guests whose needs do not always fit neatly into the categories we had imagined for them.
Perhaps that is why the idea that stayed with me most did not come from any technology. It appeared while we were trying to understand why certain gestures, decisions and memories seemed to belong to the same way of practising hospitality:
first understand the person; then decide how to look after them.
I do not know whether I would have formulated that idea in quite the same way before beginning this journey. I probably tried many times to act according to it without putting it into those words, and just as many times I probably failed to do so. Years of managing hotels do not turn every past decision into the right one. Experience also helps us recognise how much of what once seemed obvious deserves to be thought through again.
As I wrote, I found myself thinking again about meetings, guests, teams, rooms, restaurants, problems that seemed urgent and decisions that, at the time, probably mattered little beyond a single working day. Some of those experiences found their way into these pages, while many others remained in the memory from which I wrote.
I did not want to turn them into rules because I never experienced hospitality that way. Two guests may need different responses; two hotels may handle the same situation well in different ways; and even a decision that worked for years may cease to do so when people or circumstances change.
Perhaps that is why I preferred to call these texts conversations. A conversation allows us to reach a conclusion without pretending it will be the last one, to return to an idea, discover a contradiction and change the place from which we were looking. It also leaves room for the person on the other side to recognise something from their own experience or arrive at a different conclusion.
After twenty conversations, I do not feel that we have found a formula for the hotel that will be chosen in the years ahead, nor do I think we should look for one. The tools will change too quickly and hotels are too different from one another for such an answer to remain useful for very long. I do believe that we found some questions worth continuing to ask, and perhaps that is the result I am most interested in preserving.
After so many years working in hospitality, this journey did not end by teaching me only how to look at a new technology. It also forced me to look again at a craft I thought I knew.
Over time, we stop asking ourselves why certain things work, what the people who make them possible have learned, or what the person on the other side ultimately remembers. Experience helps us decide more quickly, but it can also make invisible some of the questions that were once necessary. Writing gave several of them back to me.
That is why I close these pages without the feeling that I have arrived at a definitive answer. I am left with something that now seems considerably more valuable: new reasons to keep looking at what happens every time a guest arrives.
After all, hospitality always begins again in the same way.
Someone arrives.
And someone has to be willing to welcome them.